Joe Wein’s blog

When Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe unleashed a wave of terror on his fellow Zimbabweans after his ZANU-PF party was soundly defeated in the March 29 elections and he himself gained fewer votes than opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, he was calculating that he could still steal another election and add another five years to his 28 […]

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A recently released report by Human Rights Watch about the situation in Zimbabwe before the second round of a presidential election makes for grim reading. The eyewitness reports of brutal beatings, torture and mutilations of suspected supporters of the oppositional Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) show in sickening detail how president Robert Mugabe is unleashing […]

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For months there has been talk about an Obama-Clinton or Clinton-Obama “dream ticket” (in the words of its proponents), that supposedly would draw in strong support from all the electoral groups that supported either Democratic candidate. It now looks unlikely to happen, for a number of good reasons.
As former President Jimmy Carter points out, […]

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When Japanese suicide pilots (known as kamikaze in Western countries or tokkōtai in Japanese) bid farewell to their comrades before their final missions, they would say: “See at Yasukuni!”
A bronze statue of a tokkōtai pilot at Yasukuni commemorates the numerous young men who died this way during the final months of the already lost […]

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On occasion of some spring cleaning in my office I stumbled across an old copy of The Economist (April 5-11, 2003) published as the US forces were marching on Bagdad during the invasion that eventually swept Saddam Hussein from power.
I was opposed to that war at the time (it’s not hindsight, you can ask […]

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Following political gridlock in the Japanese parliament, a “temporary” tax on petrol (gasoline) that has been in force for three decades after being renewed every couple of years is set to expire on 01 April 2008 (to readers outside of Japan: No, this is not an April Fool’s joke). As a result prices of petrol […]

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“You have shown yourself unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women.” These are the words with which murdered former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko accused Russian president Vladimir Putin in a letter dictated on his deathbed. “You succeeded in silencing one man but the whole of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. […]

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The Old Testament rule of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is often quoted to expose someone who is is merciless to those he regards as his enemies. It is quite a different kind of justice to the one preached by Jesus when he asked his followers to “turn the other […]

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